Matthew McConaughey

by Neil Daniels

  It was easy for the pair to reconnect. Working together again felt right. They love each other but also hate each other. There’s certainly a lot of respect for each other’s talents.

  The film was scheduled to be shot in the Caribbean but Warner Bros. and director Andy Tennant decided to shoot in Queensland, Australia to avoid the hurricane season, which was likely to disrupt shooting. Scenes were filmed in Port Douglas, Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Hamilton Island, Lizard Island, Airlie Beach and Hervey Bay, as well as Batt Reef, which is where Australia’s real life Crocodile Dundee Steve Irwin died from a stingray barb in 2006. Indoor scenes were filmed on the Warner Bros. studio lot.

  While staying at a luxury home in Port Douglas, McConaughey had a python in his backyard. Some days he went out diving and even swimming with a dugong, a large marine mammal. Two crew members, in fact, were stung by Irukandji jellyfish which prompted some scenes to be filmed in the Caribbean because the actors were so frightened of the venomous creatures in the water.

  McConaughey spoke at the world premiere of the movie about the indigenous wildlife. ‘I had two pythons in my tree where I was living,’ he said to journalist Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies. ‘Two pythons – eight and half-foot amethystine pythons living in a coconut tree right out in front of my spot. Everything’s cool when I see he’s in the tree everyday, but then I come home after a month and he’s gone. Now you don’t sleep so well. Checking under the bed, under the mattress, in every single closet and I couldn’t find that SOB. So, it was a wild shoot. We had sharks. I’m diving and I see bull sharks coming by. Thankfully we weren’t on the menu.’

  Sahara and We Are Marshall both faced lawsuits and Fool’s Gold was no different. Warner Bros. were sued in 2011 by Canadian writer Lou Boudreau who alleged copyright infringement by the director and two others over the authorship of the script. Comment was not made by Warner Bros.

  ‘Rom-coms are hard in a lot of ways: they’re built to be buoyant,’ McConaughey told The Guardian’s Andrew Pulver in a 2012 interview. ‘It’s easy to demean them. I did a few romantic comedies. I enjoyed them. They paid well; they were fun. I didn’t know if I wanted to do any more. I decided to sit out, and I had to endure for a while. Another one comes with a big old paycheck; I had to say no. I was looking for something to be turned on by.’

  ‘They’re a staple of American cinema,’ said director-cowriter Andy Tennant, the man behind Ever After and Hitch, to Rich Cline of Shadows on the Wall about the often derided rom-com genre. ‘They’re about people, and I like that. This particular one is about marriage – they want to kill each other, and then in the final moments they get to a point where they have to decide what’s really important. And if you can say something like that and make people laugh, that’s great!’

  ‘This isn’t one of those films where I get to be the white knight in shining armour and win the fights,’ McConaughey said to IndieLondon, ‘I’m actually the screw up who gets my butt kicked a lot and happens to get the gold and the girl in the end. It was fun.’

  There’s a great deal of honesty and respect between McConaughey and Hudson which is sometimes hard to come by between two major Hollywood actors because it’s often the case that egos get in the way. Brit actor Ray Winstone was a good laugh, too, with his screwball English sense of humour.

  ‘It just felt like it was – the relationship felt right, because it was kind of an extension of what worked with How to Lose a Guy but at the same time it was completely different – two totally different characters,’ Hudson explained to Sheila Roberts of Movies Online.

  The underwater scenes in the ocean proved difficult for cast and crew. They were taken through several emergency procedures, which lasted throughout the final month of filming. The entourage of cast and crew underwater was almost as large as that on land. They had to be sharp working underwater; there couldn’t be any laziness or fooling around involved. It was too dangerous. The film made it look as though the underwater scene wasn’t one take, but it was. It was hard to see (let alone breathe) in the ocean so filming was tough. The hardest part for Hudson was wrapping herself around the cannon. There was a mechanism close by which created the wave but it was scary for her as she struggled to see. She was a little nervous about it, though there were people on hand underwater to help her. There was a hand signal that was used if ever Hudson or McConaughey wanted to breathe; with that someone would go down with a tank of oxygen and share it with them.

  For McConaughey, the underwater acting scenes were difficult to do: he learned that you had to choreograph the scenes thoroughly before filming because you might only get one chance to film them. He knew that you just had to go down, trust your gear, trust the people around you and concentrate on the job.

  One reason why he chose dramas like Two for the Money and We Are Marshall was so that he could avoid being pigeonholed. ‘Some of my most successful films have been romantic comedies,’ he admitted to Chud’s Devin Faraci, ‘and they have, absolutely, offered me more opportunities to develop more things that are personal. It makes it a whole lot easier if this film does well for me to get something like The Loop made for ten million dollars. It’s not something people read and go, “Oh I can’t wait to throw money at that.” It’s a very peculiar, weird mystery. I really want to do it, but there’s no way I would be able to do it if I didn’t have successful box office.’

  Fool’s Gold was released February 2008 in the US and in the UK in April. The film’s budget was $70 million and it made over $110 in box office receipts, but reviews were bad with critics lambasting Hudson’s performance and saying McConaughey used the story as an excuse to expose his chest. McConaughey, however, was enthusiastic about the film’s simple premise and knew his fans and admirers would enjoy the flick, even if the critics took every opportunity to shred it to pieces.

  Brian Lowry of Variety said ‘The lure of Matthew McConaughey shirtless for extended stretches doubtless has some marketing value, but after that, Fool’s Gold offers small compensation.’

  The New York Times’ A.O. Scott wrote: ‘If only this hodgepodge offered more fun and less of the kind of frantic creative desperation that tries to pass itself off as giddy comic exuberance. Mr. McConaughey and Ms. Hudson, who were less than electrifying in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, appear to be suffering through a class in remedial chemistry, which they barely pass.’

  Simon Braund of Empire magazine wrote: ‘Absolute tosh. A ridiculous, unerringly tedious plot is weighed down by listless performances from a cast who clearly wished they were somewhere else, despite the sumptuous location.’

  Derek Adams of Time Out in London was equally dismissive: ‘We’ve all seen this kind of scenario in umpteen treasure trovers, yet what makes Fool’s Gold at least vaguely watchable is the presence of Hudson, who shares many of her mother Goldie Hawn’s more likeable comedic skills. It’s the badly timed pratfalls that bother most: aside from one laugh-out-loud moment involving Hudson thwacking McConaughey across the head with a borrowed walking stick, they are almost universally insipid.’

  Though the reviews were bad, the box office was good and it was obvious people wanted to see McConaughey and Hudson onscreen together again. They have a lot of respect for each other off screen, too. ‘I think if it works,’ McConaughey explained to Movies Online’s Sheila Roberts, ‘as it did in How to Lose a Guy, I mean, in the same way we were looking for, anticipating finding the right thing, because we wanted to get together again. I think there are definitely people out there that want to see us get back together again. I don’t know how they are going to do it, but [they] want to see them together again in the same way as we wanted to. It was just finding the right thing. How many years was it between?’

  *****

  McConaughey knew that his good looks and body got him jobs, and if having his shirt off would help make/sell the film, then he’d do it. McConaughey is his own creation; he follows his own path. Part commercial cop-out, part beat poet, part hippie, he’s an enig
ma, yet one that seems so familiar.

  Throughout the years McConaughey has learned how to live a relatively private life. He knows all too well that Hollywood is a fantasy land and that people there live in a different world than the rest of us, so when he feels like he’s had enough he hits the road for another trip or he goes back to Texas. How he handles the paparazzi entirely depends on who he is with – like many celebrities he doesn’t like to be bothered when he’s with his family but if he’s with his buddies he knows how to humour the paps. If he didn’t like the fame, he wouldn’t go out – he’d rent a palace and hire three bodyguards and end up like Phil Spector or Michael Jackson – but he’s more humble and less paranoid. McConaughey has a rational, realistic approach to fame.

  ‘…people see Matthew out always doing something,’ Kate Hudson explained to Rebecca Murray of About.com: Hollywood Movies, ‘whether it be out dancing at a bar or beaching around or taking a hike with some crazy bandana on – that was a good one. I think that, like anything, people take their image and what they want someone else to be and people just run with it. And when you really know the person and really love the person, you recognize that that person is like nothing that people really want them [to be].’

  To keep up with the challenging nature of his job and balancing his home life with his career, working out and staying in shape was paramount. His trainer Peter Park, whom he met through his Texan buddy Lance Armstrong, helps him with weights (80–84 kg), press-ups, squats, hand walks, tree branch pull-ups and traffic-light lunges. McConaughey’s fitness is incredible, sometimes he even worked out with Armstrong and while he may not be as fit as the now-disgraced cyclist McConaughey can certainly hold his own. His workouts often depend on the nature of the film he’s making at the time. He likes the challenging exercises and sometimes takes his bike out for a ride. He hates the gym and much prefers being outdoors. If he finds a weak spot on his body, he wants to strengthen it. For a film such as Fool’s Gold, it was important to the role to be in good shape.

  ‘One of the things is that I try to do it outdoors as much as possible,’ he said to People magazine. ‘I try to change up my route, and if I’m going down a road and I come across a new road or a new trail, I’ll always say, “We’ll take that one. Let’s see where we end up.” Sometimes it can get into a lot longer run than I wanted. I’ll be like, “Damn! I’ve got to find my way home.”’

  Since he first began his acting career, McConaughey has mixed it up by taking roles that were always different from ones that he’d had before. He enjoys acting and the luxuries that come with it, but his main aim has always been to spice things up.

  After Owen Wilson’s attempted suicide in August 2007, McConaughey replaced him in Ben Stiller’s action farce Tropic Thunder, which opened in US cinemas in August 2008 and later in the UK in September. Tropic Thunder isn’t a McConaughey film but he was pleased to be part of the ensemble cast nonetheless. The film stars Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr with co-stars Steve Coogan, Jay Baruchel, Brandon T. Jackson, Bill Hader and Nick Nolte.

  ‘Tropic Thunder was a different kind of comedic role,’ McConaughey told Caitlin Martis of The Film Stage. ‘It was fun to play a character and not characterise it, but it’s a little of that. There’s a character there, it’s not me being funny. It’s a character and hopefully being funny and I really like comedy. I am really turned on by comedy. I think it’s really fun and I like the timing of comedy. And that was sort of a fictitious guy they said it was based on, but it was fun playing with the imagination.’

  Directed by and starring Dodgeball actor Stiller, it is a satire of Vietnam War films such as Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now and Platoon that were popular in the late 1970s and 1980s. McConaughey plays Rick ‘Pecker’ Peck, Tugg Speedman’s (Ben Stiller) agent and best buddy. Speedman is sort of a young Sylvester Stallone-type action movie star who was once the world’s biggest action hero because of the Scorcher franchise, but his career stalled due to box office bombs. The film’s premise is essentially that a group of pampered actors are making a fictional Vietnam War film; only when the director drops them in the middle of the jungle and then gets killed, they are forced to rely on their acting skills in order to survive. Filming took place on the Hawaiian island of Kauai over 13 weeks in 2007.

  It received good reviews from critics and was a box office hit, making over $180 million from a $90 million budget. However, it was not marketed as a McConaughey film – his role is only small – so he was still in desperate need of a hit film of his own to rejuvenate his flagging career.

  The Observer’s Phillip French wrote: ‘Stiller and Co toy with these resonant notions rather than examining them, but the rich confusion of themes and aims saves the film from being merely a series of spoofs and sketches like Airplane and Naked Gun. Yet with its Oscar-night coda, the film is ultimately an affectionate celebration of Hollywood values rather than something truly subversive like Sunset Boulevard.’

  McConaughey’s personal life was in bloom – as was his bank balance – from the success of Fool’s Gold. His partner, Brazilian model Camila Alves McConaughey, whom he would shortly have children with and would later marry, was very supportive of his career. They had met at a bar on Sunset Boulevard in 2006 after his relationship with Penélope Cruz ended.

  ‘I met her in a club on Sunset [Boulevard], of all places,’ he admitted to Vogue’s John Powers. ‘The first time I saw her walk across the room, I didn’t say, “Who is that?” I said, “What is that?” The way she moved, I could see a person who knows who they are. There’s a person who spends time with herself, and is not advertising for this world, and is not asking permission. From that night I haven’t been on a date with anyone else.’

  They became friends and didn’t exclusively date until a year and a half later. Alves arrived in the US aged fifteen to visit her aunt and never left. She started modelling in her teens and worked as a TV presenter and designed handbags with her mother. Having a family changed everything for Matthew. ‘One thing I always knew I wanted to be, since I was eight years old, I knew I wanted to be a father,’ he said to the The Scotsman in 2012. ‘I didn’t know what I wanted to be. When I was twenty years old, I didn’t know what I wanted for a career. But I knew I wanted to be a father. It has been the thing that, since I was very young, I looked up to. The men I looked up to the most were fathers – men who raised good kids.’

  Their eldest Levi Alves McConaughey was born on 7 July 2008, weighing in at 7 lb, 4 oz. McConaughey spoke about his excitement for impending fatherhood in early 2008 to IndieLondon: ‘We’re six months into it, and everything’s healthy so far. We don’t know if it’s going to be a boy or a girl, and we’ll find out the day that he or she greets the day. But I’m excited. It’s going to be a new chapter.’

  OK! Magazine paid $3 million in mid-2008 for the first photos of McConaughey, then thirty-eight, with his wife and their newborn child, Levi, then just two weeks old. McConaughey bragged at the time of playing Brazilian music for fourteen hours straight during labour. The money from the OK! shoot went to j.k. livin, which is a non-profit company. There had been photographers outside the McConaughey family home for weeks desperately hoping to catch that first shot of the baby. The McConaughey’s decided to beat them to it. As soon as the OK! pics made the Internet that was it for the paparazzi.

  ‘Bringing a baby into the world is something I’ve always wanted,’ he’s quoted as saying in the Daily Mail in 2008, ‘and now I’m completely ready for my life to start revolving around another human being. I carefully maintain relationships and friendships. I’m committed to my acting career. But to be the architect of a little creature’s life is my next big adventure and I can’t wait for it to begin.’

  Becoming a father was a great new chapter in his life. He told People’s Brenda Rodriguez that as a mother Camila has a ‘real strong sense of calm’. He added: ‘We have a good flow, and neither one of us wants the other one to change. We’ve both said it, if we did cha
nge, that could be a problem! We love each other for who we are.’

  When McConaughey was asked by Movies Online’s Sheila Roberts in 2008 if he anticipated a change of lifestyle after he became a dad, he responded: ‘You know my instincts will take over when the young one greets the world. One thing I’ve heard that’s consistent – and I’ve got a lot of great moms and dads around me from my own to elders to peers of mine – is that all the grand plans you want to make, you might as well throw them out buddy, because it doesn’t happen like that.’

  Five years before the birth of his first child McConaughey reckoned that if he were to have a wife and child then he wouldn’t want to live in Hollywood, instead he’d rather pack up and move back to Texas and do something else, but he’d turned that around. Now he chose to continue to act while juggling family life and living in Southern California and Texas.

  We are the architects of our lives; everyone has dreams, ambitions and desires. McConaughey had new projects on the go and ideas about what he wanted to do with his career but being a father changed everything for him. He knew that raising a child was going to be his greatest achievement over anything else. To raise a healthy child and bring him up the right way, and then let him venture into the world as an adult with the knowledge that he had gained from his father, was going to be McConaughey’s finest goal in life. His days as the lone contemplative travelling man were over and so were his days as a bachelor and single Hollywood hunk. Being a father had changed everything for him. Raising a child would be his proudest achievement over anything he’d managed to succeed at in his film career.

  ‘I think he will be an incredible dad,’ McConaughey’s co-star of two films, Kate Hudson, said to Sheila Roberts of Movies Online back in 2008. Their home life was simple: Camila wakes up first before McConaughey gets up and makes a breakfast shake. They’ll feed Levi a shake, put some music on and play with Levi. He’ll stand on his mum or dad’s chest and start dancing. He started learning Portuguese words as soon as he could talk. Levi wasn’t a big fan of baby speak; he tended to look at his parents as though he was wondering what on earth was going on. ‘Levi is into everything. You don’t go out and walk in the backyard and daydream for five seconds or they’re on top of the house,’ McConaughey said to late night US talk show host Jay Leno.